Primo Levi

"Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?". I don't know whether it is because I'm currently in the process of reading Weber but on many levels, this seems to be referring to the structure of bureaucracy. Weber writes; "The content of discipline is nothing but the consistently rationalized, methodically trained and exact execution of the received order in which all personal criticism is unconditionally suspended and the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carrying out the command". In many ways, this made me think about what happens when rationalization and methodical thinking to its absolute extreme. The ability of the Nazi regime to set up a bureaucracy that was single mindedly devoted to the cause of 'fascism' and the extermination of people is incredible. And there is something to be said about the human capacity for causing suffering. Levi shows that, pushed far enough, the idea of causing pain no longer holds the moral/ethical implications - but more than that, it no longer holds the very real human implications either. This, to me, is incredible.

If This is a Man...

Disclaimer: At times, I may be rambling. I apologize in advance. 

Levi's work, above all, left me thinking about silences. It seems we have discussed them so often in the course of this semester- how they can be useful, how they fail. Yet, this kind of silence is one which we face when we read accounts like Levi's or like Harriet Jacob's. The kind that leave us dumb too. The kind that carry so much weight that they dare not be breached, they cannot be translated. There is an unspeakable- and no matter how hard one tries, it cannot be said. That reality is too painful to be captured.

Are we better off for it?  

Are we protected from that reality? 

Does the silence shield us from that world? 

We read accounts and state that we do not have words to analyze them, we state how "depressing" they are- yet we persist. Yet we must remember. We always come back to that one point- we owe it to them to remember, in whatever way possible. We owe it the ones we have left out. 

For silence is also a luxury of the privileged. It makes us perpetrators. We can afford not to speak, but by not speaking we aid the oppressors. Levi's testimony (narrative and experience just don't seem to fit here) lay out for us what "what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz". We struggle to comprehend how human beings could do this to each other- and we do not have answers, We do not understand the cold rationality of it all; the systematic way humans are torn from all that defines them as human.

 

Maybe we are not meant to understand. Maybe the structured violence inflicted by those camps was meant to silence. Maybe we do not have the words.

Does that mean we stop trying?

"...that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces without soap in dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must polish our shoes, not because the regulation states it, but for dignity and propriety. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to Prussian discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die." 

Mingolo

In his article, Mingolo compels us to reconsider our naïve notions regarding the knowledge-making process – one that completely negates that knowledge production has actual geo-political locations, that is closely tied to very real power structures in the world, and indeed is part of that process. Mingolo explains how the Geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. He is basically concerned with questions of Who, when, why and where is knowledge generated, and in doing so he attempts to shift our focus from the “enunciated to the enunciation”. However if we recognize the knowledge production is tied to coloniality, how do we respond to it in order to move beyond this conundrum. Mingolo claims that it is not enough to simply change the content of what is being said, but actually the terms in which it is being said. However, in the process of changing those terms – what alternative do we really have? And, how much scope do we really have to change the terms involved in the discussion? Can we really delink ourselves by playing within the rules of the game? For instance, much of what we have talked about positionality in this course is an attempt to push us  into that direction of delinking ourselves, however, how emancipatory is it, if continues to hold the same system, and uses the same terms of agency, resistance, autonomous domain, rationality.  I agree that in attempting to call in question the colonial foundation of modern knowledge production we need to shift our attention from the known to the knower, but even then what possilbities do we really have?

Session 14

Minglo’s book on the Idea of Latin America presents a familiar argument: it demonstrates the power that a construct can have in shaping the way that people think. The invention of America, rather than its discovery, served to construct two distinct geographical and political regions in the dominant imaginary; “Latin” America and “Anglo Saxon” America. The former became increasingly dark as time passed and was gradually distinguished from both “White” North America and the European Latin nation-states. 

The construction of this idea of racial of difference was crucial to the logic of colonialism and remains an integral part of contemporary imperialism. Minglo’s main argument is that the politics that emerges out of this idea, even in the present day, is one which is contingent on the geographical location of a nation-state, the race of its people and the stereotypes that are assigned to them. These politics he contends, serve to solidify unequal distributions of wealth and power amongst industrialized nation-states and post-colonial ones. 

Minglo’s idea of the imagined Latin America can be considered parallel to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Hyper-Real Europe”. Similar to the construct of Latin America, Chakrabarty’s Europe is associated with a specific geographical region and is made distinct from all other entities. Both constructs serve to create categories of people and associated hierarchies, and the existence of both is closely tied to colonialism/modernity.

A Decolonial Aura

Mignolo announces nothing less than a radical critique of modernity that seeks to situate it within what he calls “coloniality.” According to Mignolo, decoloniality involves generalizing the experiences of decolonization and anticolonial struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America into a new epistemic frame. The project of decoloniality therefore involves a double gesture: first, the re-embodiment and relocation of thought in order to unmask the limited situation of modern knowledges and their link to coloniality, and second, an-other thinking that calls for plurality and intercultural dialogue. I somehow find this project of decoloniality a little too ambitious. It can be problematized in various ways. So for example, de-linking/decoloniality can take place through what Mignolo refers to as “disciplinary knowledge making” that takes place through speaking the language of particular civilization. But the conundrum as he himself points out is that one can of course do sociology in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Mandarin etc etc. But doing so puts us at a disadvantage to “mainstream disciplinary debates”. Thus there is a difference that remains between local versus European sociology whereby even when doing sociology in any of the European languages (English, French, German etc) will be localizing it, it will still be widely read and understood. As he himself points out “the inverse will not hold”.  As such any knowledge produced  in any language can be attested through translation into a European language only affirms the power of European knowledge system and problematizes translation. This is just one example. How is this then delinking? Also when we think of decoloniality how are we thinking of separating ourselves from the institutions of colonial knowledge production whose legacies resonate in every domain. More so, even if decoloniality as a project seeks to decenter Europe as one of the many centers of knowledge,  we need not ignore that indigenous languages are not inherently egalitarian or liberating just because they are non-European. Non-European languages can have hierarchical, conservative, or reactionary forms of address?

Founding Statement

The Founding Statement talks about the danger of filtering cultural hegemonies all the way across the political spectrum, from the elites themselves to the epistemologies and discourses of revolutionary movements looking to subvert their power in the name of the "people".
Even in the case of the Cuban Revolution, it was the "working masses" that was written about by the elite intellectuals who insisted on a unitary, class-based subject veiling "the disparity of blacks, Indians, Chicanos and women; alternative models of sexuality and of the body; alternative epistemologies and ontologies; the existence of who had not entered into the social pact with the (revolutionary) state". This basically sums up all those groups, and their perspectives, about whom we have studied in the course so far. Using the same lens for the Latin American case places a particular detactment with the subaltern that was not the case with the "Indian" subaltern.
The emergence of students in the political arena changes the dynamics in Latin America where the subaltern subject representated in the testimonial text becomes a part of the construction of the text itself. It seems as if the degree of marginalisation or subalternity within Latin American society in the second and third phase was less than South Asia. This comparison would be useful in gauging the state of scholarship on Subaltern studies in the two regions.

Latin American Subaltern

Let me begin by saying that this is the first of two blogs. For various reasons, I've been unable to go through any reading except the founding statement of the Latin American Subaltern Collective. I'll write on it and then add on the other readings by noon or sometime around that.

What is interesting is that despite being geographically so distant from the Indian context, the Latin American subaltern collective is dealing some of the same issues. They talk about Marxist categories and the heterogeneity that it misses out on and how they seek to challenge them. But more than that, the Latin American writers seem to be keenly aware of the problems they might encounter. They talk about non-working classes being part of the subaltern group. They also seem to be deeply cognizant of the limits of their own approach. All this is highly appreciated.

I'll add more later. Urghh, so sleepy.